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- #FREEWAY CRACK IN THE SYSTEM DOCUMENTARY PART 2 MOVIE#
- #FREEWAY CRACK IN THE SYSTEM DOCUMENTARY PART 2 FREE#
Blandon had more cocaine than anyone could have wished for. Ross and Blandon were made for each other. “I made all my money back that same day,” he says. So one day, Ross says, he and Blandon both paid $60,000 to a broker who arranged for them to meet. Congress and the CIA.īy the early 1980s, Ross had heard that Blandon was trying to unload huge quantities of premium-grade cocaine. His fame on the streets led him to Oscar Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan dope dealer with ties to the Contras - a ragged band of mercenaries and ex-landowners trying to overthrow the Sandinista-led government in Nicaragua with the help of the U.S. Ross was the man to see if you wanted to unload cocaine in L.A. More often than not, his customers paid him in $1 bills. He marketed his product to the gangs, Crips and Bloods, who ran the streets. He distilled the powder into rock, using an existing method developed in the late 1970s. Cocaine was too expensive most of the black folks who lived there were too poor to afford it. And what he saw - what others might not have seen - was a vast and untapped market in South Central Los Angeles, where he grew up.Įveryone told him his plan was impossible. One day a friend, a teacher, urged him to start dealing. That white powder and the life it promised intrigued him. Unlike so many of his friends, Ross had options. The high-rolling life of a drug-dealing gangster piqued Ross’ interest. The first time Ricky Donnel Ross saw cocaine was in the theater, watching the 1972 hit “Superfly,” which depicted the life of Priest, a cocaine dealer trying to quit the streets - but not before making one last big score. Ross, sitting comfortably at the eye of the storm, became a multimillionaire selling “rock” to the “dope fiends” whose addiction fueled the epidemic. A steady course of African-American progress was essentially halted in its tracks as the crack epidemic escalated, peaked and, finally, in the late 1990s, began to subside. Within a single generation, national homicide rates for young black males more than doubled, foster care enrollment rose and families fell apart. Today, the impacts of crack’s invasion are still apparent in many sectors of society: in America’s broken families, in its overpopulated prisons, and in a generation of people whose growth and promise were stunted by the power of a little white rock. The end of 2010 marks three decades since the epidemic struck. According to a recent study released by The Rand Corp., between 19, Oakland ranked seventh out of 232 American cities with significant crack problems. Huge swaths of urban America were engulfed by violence and despair as the hunger for crack grew. Within a few short years in the early and mid-1980s, crack - a highly addictive, smokable and, most importantly, cheap form of cocaine - had rocketed into virtually every big city in America, thanks in large part to Ross’ particular business acumen.
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He has victims, though - thousands and thousands of them.Īmerica’s “crack epidemic” began on the South Central Los Angeles streets Ross controlled with an iron fist and a seemingly endless appetite for domination.
#FREEWAY CRACK IN THE SYSTEM DOCUMENTARY PART 2 MOVIE#
Last week, Cassavetes delivered a script for the movie to Ross.īut, he adds, thinking about it carefully, the only one who can really make Ross rich again, rich the way he once was - when he could pay for a house in cash on the spot or dole out $25,000 a week to his five girlfriends - is Ross himself.
#FREEWAY CRACK IN THE SYSTEM DOCUMENTARY PART 2 FREE#
Ross, 50, is now a free man, smiling coyly and driving a beat-up blue Chevrolet Astro van down Del Amo Boulevard toward Carson, where he lives, and toward his conference call with Cassavetes, who Ross hopes will be the one to help tell his life story on the big screen.